Voting rights ruling is reminder of how precarious our rights can be

We will look back on the week of June 24, 2013, as one the Supreme Court of the United States reset America's view of civil rights - delivering decisions on same-sex marriages and affirmative action, and overturning arguably the most effective civil rights legislation in our history.

Although recent election rules enacted and proposed by our General Assembly may have sparked a wish that Tennessee was under the Department of Justice microscope, unlike our southern neighbors, our state was not required to have changes in its election rules and processes approved by the U.S. attorney general, a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Congress enacted to enforce the 15th Amendment of the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

And now, at least until Congress acts to revise its formula to determine who should be so regulated, no jurisdiction is subject to automatic scrutiny based on past misdeeds. The Supreme Court, in its 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, held that Section 4 of the act, which determined the jurisdictions that were subject to the pre-clearance rules of Section 5 of the act, was unconstitutional. State's rights advocates cheered; civil rights activists jeered.

The court is correct that Congress has failed to do its job by merely tacking on more years of enforcement to the same jurisdictions the act's formula identified in the 1960s, which unjustly penalizes places that have made enormous strides in the nearly 50 years since the act was absolutely necessary.

But none of us believes that voter discrimination on racial lines has been eliminated, and the decision effectively guts the act.

As John Neiman, Alabama's solicitor general, wrote on the SCOTUS blog Friday:

"Most of the criticism of the Shelby County decision seems to be aimed not so much at its legal analysis as the practical result to which that analysis may lead. ?

"It certainly appears that some members of Congress want to fix Section 4(b), and it will be interesting to see what they propose. Any rational formula is not going to cover the same states as the old one. In fact, a new formula keyed to updated versions of the states on which the original formula turned - minority voter registration and turnout - might cause a turnabout of considerable magnitude. These numbers are substantially better for minorities in many of the states originally covered by Section 5, and substantially worse in many states that have never had to preclear their laws. So a revised formula that focused on these numbers might require preclearance in states like Massachusetts, Washington and Colorado.

"Perhaps this is why so many people say that a revision is not going to happen."

Which is why we should give long pause and consider the dissenting opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She noted that when Congress renewed the act in 2006 for 25 years, it wrote, "40 years has not been sufficient time to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination following nearly 100 years" of racial discrimination. Although practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests no longer exist, she wrote, the weight of black citizens' votes is still lessened through other, more subtle forms of discrimination.

We are all too familiar with the tendencies of those in power to do anything to stay there, and election rules have become a too easy manner of achieving that petty goal.

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Voting rights ruling is reminder of how precarious our rights can be

The Supreme Court ruling striking down key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act should remind us that our rights are easily trampled.